Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
[9] [7] Sentences may either be clearly acceptable or clearly unacceptable, but there are also sentences that are partially acceptable. Hence, according to Sprouse, the difference between grammaticality and acceptability is that grammatical knowledge is categorical, but acceptability is a gradient scale.
For example: The man who heard that the dog had been killed on the radio ran away. One can tell if a sentence is center embedded or edge embedded depending on where the brackets are located in the sentence. [Joe believes [Mary thinks [John is handsome.]]] The cat [that the dog [that the man hit] chased] meowed.
The first example has canonical word order. The second example illustrates how the definite pronoun [das] becomes ungrammatical when scrambled out of the embedded clause into the main clause. The sentence becomes strongly unacceptable. Extraposition is similar.
In linguistics, a comparative illusion (CI) or Escher sentence [a] is a comparative sentence which initially seems to be acceptable but upon closer reflection has no well-formed, sensical meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is More people have been to Russia than I have .
For example, riding the bus is a sufficient mode of transportation to get to work. But there are other modes of transportation – car, taxi, bicycle, walking – that can be used. Modal scope fallacy – a degree of unwarranted necessity is placed in the conclusion.
Acceptability is an amorphous concept, being both highly subjective and circumstantial; a thing may be acceptable to one evaluator and unacceptable to another, or unacceptable for one purpose but acceptable for another. Furthermore, acceptability is not necessarily a logical or consistent exercise.
These examples illustrate that stripping is flexible insofar as the remnant in the stripped clause is not limited in function; it can, for instance, be a subject as in the first sentence or an object as in the second sentence. A particularly frequent type of stripping is not-stripping (stripping in the presence of not), e.g.:
The sentence could be misread as the turning action attaching either to the handsome school building or to nothing at all. As another example, in the sentence "At the age of eight, my family finally bought a dog", [3] the modifier At the age of eight is dangling. It is intended to specify the narrator's age when the family bought the dog, but ...